What kind of stretching do you do and when?

I rarely stretch, just do leg swings before and after runs, I never get hurt. Static stretching is worthless, do drills before and drills and/or gentle dynamic stretching after

Thanks Heavyd84 - me too!

Curious what others do. I know times are changing.

My boyfriend stretches my butthole whenever he wants. I'm making a video about it. Stay posted.

Static stretching while the muscles are cold is a useless exercise. Increasing ROM of joints is all 'stretching' ought aim to do. A large body of evidence suggests more limber muscles are actually less efficient if running fast is a goal. However, joint ROM is always good and dynamic, non-ballistic stretching before effort is a worthy principle.

But to enhance joint ROM effectively, muscles, tendons and ligaments are best stretched while warm, and held for some time in a static position. The idea is soft tissue including muscles, tendons and ligaments are viscoelastic. This means they are biphasic - they exhibit either viscous or elastic properties depending on the length and depth of any attempt to deform (stretch) them.

Stretching a muscle in the elastic region is mostly useless for long-term changes. You have to push past the 'yield' point into the plastic region, which more or less means any changes are more permanent. This gives greater joint ROM as it produces long-term changes in ligaments especially. These are pretty much immune to any dynamic pre-workout stretching you may do.

Ask your physio before trying any of these techniques for yourself.

yoga

other than that, never

jfivcy, does that mean you static stretch after being warm/working out?

I don't believe in it. You ever see a lion limber up before it takes down a gazelle?

like the previous poster, maybe some leg swings or that sort before working out in the morning, but very gently.

i do some light dynamic stretches if i'm stopped at a light, and throughout the day when others aren't around.

i do some near-static stretching (very slow dynamic) after my workouts, but only because it feels good and seems to relax me. nothing specific, but i try to avoid getting too flexible because that negatively affects my running. people ask me if i do yoga, but i think that's because i like stretching and do what comes naturally, and that's probably how most of the more basic yoga poses came about thousands of years ago.

I'm Gumbi wrote:

jfivcy, does that mean you static stretch after being warm/working out?

Yes. Repeated sub-maximal stretching (as with the normal lengthening you'd expect of Achilles etc an easy run) lengthens tendons and muscles for a few hours after impact exercise (called hysteresis). This places you closer to the yeild point I spoke of earlier, and it just all-round safer and more effective.

Here's a stress/strain graph for soft tissue, showing the elastic and plastic deformaiton regions. Stress is the force going into the tissue and strain is the rate or amount of deformation resulting from that stress. To effectively lengthen the tissue, you must go into the plastic region.

Again, stretching can be dangerous if you take it too far so before you do anything ask your physio if he agrees, or has added information for you.

No AIS people?

Greased Lightning wrote:

I don't believe in it. You ever see a lion limber up before it takes down a gazelle?

I've seen plenty of footage of wild felines stretching when they wake up/get up.

You should watch a few documentaries or spend a couple of days in the company of a cat.

10 x 100 m all out.

843756 wrote:

Greased Lightning wrote:

I don't believe in it. You ever see a lion limber up before it takes down a gazelle?

I've seen plenty of footage of wild felines stretching when they wake up/get up.

You should watch a few documentaries or spend a couple of days in the company of a cat.

You should watch a movie once in a while and realize it was a quote from Zombieland.